The Youngest Girl in the School.

by Evelyn Sharp.

CHAPTER I

IN A LONDON SCHOOLROOM

'It's no good,' sighed Barbara, looking disconsolately round the room; 'we shall never get straight in time. Don't you think we had better leave it, and let Auntie Anna see us as we really are? She will only be disappointed afterwards, if we begin by being tidy; and I don't like disappointing people, do you?'

There was a shout of laughter when she finished speaking, and Barbara frowned. She never knew why the boys laughed at her when she tried to explain her reasons for doing things, but they always did.

'Is that why you have put on your very shortest frock?' asked Wilfred, who was brewing something in a saucepan over the fire. 'I believe you think that if Auntie Anna saw you for the first time in your Sunday frock, she might suppose you were a nice, proper little girl, instead of----'

Barbara seized the sofa cushion and aimed it at him threateningly.

'Instead of what?' she demanded.

Wilfred was at a disadvantage, owing to his position as well as to the precious quality of the liquid in the saucepan; and he felt it wiser to make terms. 'Well,' he observed, 'you might at least have put on a longer frock for the credit of the family; now, mightn't you?'

Barbara looked down at her blue serge skirt, edged with certain rows of white braid that only made it look shorter; and she gave it a pull to make it fall a little lower over the slim black legs that appeared beneath it. 'It's not my fault that I have just come from a gymnastic cla.s.s,'

she protested. 'Besides, my Sunday frock is only two inches longer! What difference does two inches make, even if we _have_ got an aunt coming?

You're so particular, Wilfred.'

'Stick to your chemicals, Will, and leave the Babe alone,' growled Egbert, who was trying to read a novel on the sofa and found the conversation disturbing.

It was not often that the eldest of the family troubled himself about the disputes of the others, and Barbara was encouraged to go on. 'Besides,'

she added, 'there isn't time to change now. Auntie Anna will arrive directly; and who is going to tidy up the schoolroom if I don't?'

Certainly, no one responded to her appeal. Egbert and Wilfred became suddenly and suspiciously interested in what they were doing, while the two other boys, who were seated on the edge of the table, continued to swing their legs lazily backwards and forwards without making an effort to help her. Barbara turned upon them reproachfully.

'It is perfectly horrible of you to sit there laughing, when a strange aunt and a strange daughter may be here at any minute!' she declared. 'I think _you_ might do something, Peter.'

'Not much!' laughed Peter, a tall, broad-shouldered fellow of fifteen or so. 'It's good for little girls to do things, and keeps them from growing out of all their clothes.'

'Chuck it, Babs!' advised the younger of the two. 'What does it matter whether she thinks we live in a pig-sty or not?'

Barbara looked at them doubtfully, then picked up a pile of ragged music and staggered across to the cupboard, shot the music into it, and closed the door just in time to prevent her load from recoiling upon her. A derisive chuckle from the boys on the table greeted her first attempt at tidying up; but she went on resolutely.

'Visitors have no business to come and see people at a day's notice like this,' she complained, as she swept a handful of rusty nails, empty gum bottles, and other evidences of past occupations into a crowded waste-paper basket.

Christopher stopped laughing as she said this, and a change crept over his pale, rather delicate features. 'When the visitor is an _aunt_,' he said with energy, 'a day's notice is more than enough.'

He a.s.sociated the aunt in question with certain reforms that had taken place from time to time in the household; and he had never forgiven her for inducing their father, just two years ago, to dismiss the nurse they had all adored and to send Robin and himself to a hated day-school. There was no knowing what innovations they might not be forced to accept, now that she was going to descend upon them in person.

Peter chuckled again. Most things to Peter were an occasion for a chuckle.

'That depends on the spirit in which she comes,' he remarked, and he turned his pockets graphically inside out. 'An aunt who has a big place in the country, and can afford to travel about in beastly holes like Munich and the Italian lakes----'

'And can pick up other people's daughters and adopt them,' chimed in Christopher, 'just because their fathers died fighting in the Soudan and their mothers died--how did their mothers die, Egbert?'

'Penniless,' grunted Egbert, in response to the kick his book had just received. 'That's why the kid got adopted, of course.'

'Well,' proceeded Peter, putting his pockets back and nodding wisely, 'if an aunt like that doesn't behave decently to her deserving nephews----'

'And niece,' added Babs from the back of the sofa, where she had just deposited a bundle of old schoolbooks.

Peter went on unabashed. 'To her deserving nephews and undeserving niece,'

he said, smiling, 'then she'll be an awful old dragon!'

'There's something in that,' observed Wilfred, taking the saucepan over to the window for inspection. 'Perhaps she'll give me those new retorts and things I want for my laboratory--if I ever get a laboratory,' he added with a sigh.

'Perhaps she'll send me straight to college without expecting me to grind for a musty old scholarship,' said Egbert, condescending to take a share in the conversation.

'If she asks me down to Crofts for the shooting, that will be good enough for me,' observed Peter, drawing a long breath of antic.i.p.ation.

Barbara came slowly into the middle of the room and stood there, quite unconscious of her rumpled hair and of the streak of dust that was smeared across her face. 'I wonder what Auntie Anna will do for me?' she murmured, more to herself than to the others. 'I hope, I do hope it will be something new and interesting and beautiful!'

Christopher overheard her, and roused himself. He slipped off the table and walked to his favourite position on the hearthrug, giving an unnecessary pull to the child's hair as he pa.s.sed her, which was an attention, however, that she showed no signs of resenting. Babs never resented anything that Kit chose to do to her; besides, she wanted to hear what he was going to say. Whenever Kit stood like that, with his back to the fire and his legs rather wide apart, he was always going to say something. The odd thing was, that there was something so convincing in his way of saying it that the family generally listened.

'Don't you fret yourselves, any of you,' he said decidedly. 'Auntie Anna isn't going to make things pleasant for anybody in this house--not she!

Hasn't she persuaded father to do whatever she likes, all our lives?'

'What is she going to make him do now, then?' asked Wilfred, who did not mean to give up his dream of a laboratory without a protest.

'First of all,' said Christopher, with an air of confidence, 'she'll see that Egbert has a crammer next summer holidays; and he'll either have to get that scholarship, or he doesn't go to Oxford at all! She'll talk about discipline, and things like that. Aunts always do talk about discipline, when it's for other people's children.'

'I wish you'd shut up,' grumbled Egbert, returning to his book. 'How is a fellow to read when you're making such a clatter?'

'Then there's Peter,' continued Christopher, calmly. 'Of course she'll say he's much too young to be trusted with a gun, though he is such an overgrown, hulking chap; and why isn't he in the fifth instead of the upper fourth, at _his_ age?'

'What do you know about it, you youngest-but-two?' shouted Peter, wrathfully.

Kit peered at him through his spectacles, and went on as impudently as ever. He was never afraid to speak his mind, for none of the others would have dreamed of laying a finger, except in fun, on the one brother who was not strong enough to defend himself; and Kit knew this, as well as he knew his superiority over them in the matter of brains. The only wonder was that the knowledge had not made him a prig. Perhaps it would have been difficult, though, in the hurly-burly of the Berkeley family, for any one to have been a prig.

'As for Wilfred,' he resumed, 'she'll upset all his ambitions before he can turn round. Do you suppose she'll encourage his messing about with things in saucepans, just because he wants to be a doctor? Not she!

She'll talk about some rotten business in the City instead. Aunts always know millions of places in the City where they can shove their unwilling nephews.'

'Oh, I say, dry up!' objected Wilfred, who was already sufficiently depressed by the discovery that the brew in the saucepan was not a success.

'Then she'll pack Robin off to a preparatory at Brighton--never knew an aunt yet who didn't want to send you to a preparatory at Brighton!--and she'll do the same to me, only she'll choose a beastly inferior place, where I shall be looked after by some _woman_,' concluded Christopher, in a tone of scorn. Then he caught sight of Barbara, who was still standing thoughtfully in the middle of the room; and he shook his head at her pityingly. 'After that, having cleared the house of boys, she'll turn her attention to the Babe,' he said, and paused rather abruptly.

Barbara woke up from her reflections with a start. 'Yes, Kit?' she said questioningly. 'What will Auntie Anna do to me?'

Kit's expression of pity became exaggerated. 'To begin with,' he said, with a deep sigh, 'she'll let down your frocks, and tie back your hair, and never let you go anywhere alone, not even to the pillar-box at the corner!'

The other boys began to laugh afresh.

'Think of the Babe with her hair bunched up on the top, and fastened with a bit of ribbon! She'll look exactly like a French poodle, won't she?'

scoffed Peter.